Digital Preservation
Best Practice for Museums
Recommendations for Museums
Conclusion
Based on the overall recommendations provided by the best practices
guides and placing into context the environment in which museums operate,
two kinds of recommended actions can be provided. Actions that can be
implemented at an institutional level are those that each individual
museum should be doing immediately. Broader recommendations may require
either collaboration or an umbrella organization to execute or is only
relevant in the context of a longer-term view of activities.
Action recommendations:
- Establish a set of policy documents governing activities related to
digital preservation within the institution. A possible checklist of
questions to help establish a digital preservation policy is provided in
appendix A.
- Inventory existing digital holdings and quantify their significant
properties; maintain that inventory as the collection grows.
- Assign at least 1 staff member clear responsibilities for overseeing
digital preservation activities and mainstream digital preservation
activities into the operations of the institution.
- Consolidate and reduce the number of media types in the collection
and create at least 1 additional copy for storage in an offsite location.
- Prioritize the relative importance of each format type and the
resources allocated to supporting that format. Identify formats that the
institution will not support and ensure creators/depositors are informed
of this.
- Ensure that each digital object in the collection is assigned a
persistent identifier with an eye to ensuring that the persistent
identifier mechanism is viable beyond the institution.
- Develop a timetable for evaluating holdings including integrity checks
of the bit-level data, media refreshing and retention evaluation.
- Identify a metadata standard that fits with the institution's community
of practice and develop local implementation procedures or adopt an
available usage guide to formalize the institutional approach to the
usage of the standard.
Broader recommendations:
- Implement a technology watch protocol to ensure that no media type, file
format or standard becomes obsolete before objects associated with any of
the above have been addressed sufficiently.
- Establish collaborative links with other institutions to share expertise
and resources; create clusters of expertise in handling particular kinds of
digital objects.
- Identify and endorse standards and formats with broad support and
sustainable potential and encourage creators to use those standards and
formats for digital objects with enduring value.
- Adopt a system that automates much of the lifecycle management of the
digital objects.
- Secure from copyright holders rights in perpetuity to copy and modify the
object in support of preservation activities.
Conclusion
Given the overall fluidity with which the digital landscape changes, it is
doubtful that the techniques of today will be sufficient for the problems
of tomorrow. However, the real solution for digital preservation may lie
less in technology and more in policy. As Margaret Hedstrom points out,
"[t]his challenge is as much a social and institutional problem as it is a
technical one, because for long-term preservation, we rely on institutions
that go through changes in direction, purpose, management, and funding"
(CLIR, 2002). For museums, having sound policy that maintains human
accessibility to the digital objects is critical. The preservation of
digital cultural objects will ultimately be found in the overall commitment
to preserve our society's culture and heritage regardless of technical
issues.